Literary realism

Literary realism is the trend, beginning with mid nineteenth-century French literature and
extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors, toward depictions of
contemporary life and society as it was, or is. In the spirit of general "realism," realist
authors opted for depictions of everyday and banal activities and experiences, instead of
a romanticized or similarly stylized presentation.
Anglophones
George Eliot's novel Middlemarch stands as a great milestone in the realist tradition. It is
a primary example of nineteenth-century realism's role in the naturalization of the
burgeoning capitalist marketplace.
William Dean Howells was the first American author to bring a realist aesthetic to the
literature of the United States. His stories of 1850s Boston upper-crust life are highly
regarded among scholars of American fiction. His most popular novel, The Rise of Silas
Lapham, depicts a man who falls from materialistic fortune by his own mistakes. Stephen
Crane has also been recognized as illustrating important aspects of realism to American
fiction in the stories Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and The Open Boat.[1][2]
Latin American Literature
Adventure novels about the gold rush in Chile in the 1850s, such as Martin
Rivas by Alberto Blest Gana, and the gaucho epic poem Martin Fierro by Argentine José
Hernández are among the iconic and populist 19th century literary works written in
Spanish and published in Latin America.
Zenith Honoré de Balzac is often credited with pioneering a systematic realism in French
literature, through the inclusion of specific detail and recurring characters.[3][4][5] Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Gustave Flaubert, and Ivan Turgenev are regarded by many
critics as representing the zenith of the realist style with their unadorned prose and
attention to the details of everyday life.[citation needed] In German literature, 19th-century
realism developed under the name of "Poetic Realism" or "Bourgeois Realism," and major
figures include Theodor Fontane, Gustav Freytag, Gottfried Keller, Wilhelm
Raabe, Adalbert Stifter, and Theodor Storm.[6] Later "realist" writers included Benito
Pérez Galdós, Nikolai Leskov, Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, José Maria de Eça
de Queiroz, Machado de Assis, Bolesław Prus and, in a sense, Émile Zola,
whose naturalism is often regarded as an offshoot of realism.

The 19th Century

Early 19th-century literature
After the American Revolution, and increasingly after the War of 1812, American writers
were exhorted to produce a literature that was truly native. As if in response, four authors
of very respectable stature appeared. William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James
Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe initiated a great half century of literary
development.
Bryant, a New Englander by birth, attracted attention in his 23rd year when the first
version of his poem “Thanatopsis” (1817) appeared. This, as well as some later poems,
was written under the influence of English 18th-century poets. Still later, however, under
the influence of Wordsworth and other Romantics, he wrote nature lyrics that vividly
represented the New England scene. Turning to journalism, he had a long career as a
fighting liberal editor of The Evening Post. He himself was overshadowed, in renown at
least, by a native-born New Yorker, Washington Irving.
Irving, the youngest member of a prosperous merchant family, joined with ebullient young
men of the town in producing the Salmagundi papers (1807–08), which satirized the
foibles of Manhattan’s citizenry. This was followed by A History of New York (1809), by
“Diedrich Knickerbocker,” a burlesque history that mocked pedantic scholarship and
sniped at the old Dutch families. Irving’s models in these works were obviously
Neoclassical English satirists, from whom he had learned to write in a polished, bright
style. Later, having met Sir Walter Scott and having become acquainted with
imaginative German literature, he introduced a new Romantic note in The Sketch
Book (1819–20), Bracebridge Hall (1822), and other works. He was the first American
writer to win the ungrudging (if somewhat surprised) respect of British critics.
James Fenimore Cooper won even wider fame. Following the pattern of Sir Walter Scott’s
“Waverley” novels, he did his best work in the “Leatherstocking” tales (1823–41), a five-
volume series celebrating the career of a great frontiersman named Natty Bumppo. His
skill in weaving history into inventive plots and in characterizing his compatriots brought
him acclaim not only in America and England but on the continent of Europe as well.
Edgar Allan Poe, reared in the South, lived and worked as an author and editor in
Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, and New York City. His work was shaped largely
by analytical skill that showed clearly in his role as an editor: time after time he gauged
the taste of readers so accurately that circulation figures of magazines under his direction
soared impressively. It showed itself in his critical essays, wherein he lucidly explained
and logically applied his criteria. His gothic tales of terror were written in accordance with
his findings when he studied the most popular magazines of the day. His masterpieces
of terror—“The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842),
“The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), and others—were written according to a carefully
worked out psychological method. So were his detective stories, such as “The Murders
in the Rue Morgue” (1841), which historians credited as the first of the genre. As a poet,
he achieved fame with “The Raven” (1845). His work, especially his critical writings and
carefully crafted poems, had perhaps a greater influence in France, where they were
translated by Charles Baudelaire, than in his own country.
Two of the most intensely lyrical works of the 1930s were autobiographical novels set in
the Jewish ghetto of New York City’s Lower East Side before World War I: Michael Gold’s
harsh Jews Without Money (1930) and Henry Roth’s Proustian Call It Sleep (1934), one
of the greatest novels of the decade. They followed in the footsteps of Anzia Yezierska,
a prolific writer of the 1920s whose passionate books about immigrant Jews,
especially Bread Givers (1925), have been rediscovered by contemporary feminists.
Another lyrical and autobiographical writer, whose books have faded badly, was Thomas
Wolfe, who put all his strivings, thoughts, and feelings into works such as Look
Homeward, Angel (1929) and Of Time and the River (1935) before his early death in
1938. These Whitmanesque books, as well as posthumously edited ones such as The
Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), dealt with a figure much
like Wolfe, echoing the author’s youth in the South, young manhood in the North, and
eternal search to fulfill a vision. Though grandiose, they influenced many young writers,
including Jack Kerouac.